When the Canvas Became a Stage

For centuries, the defining power of art was its stubborn refusal to be useful.

A painting doesn't harvest crops. A sculpture doesn't build shelter. A poem doesn't balance a ledger. As Oscar Wilde famously insisted, all art is "quite useless." And in the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant actually formalized this idea. He called it purposiveness without a purpose.

Art existed outside the machinery of daily productivity. It offered a rare, autonomous space for ambiguity, reflection, and pure aesthetic encounter.

But if you walk through a contemporary art fair today, or just scroll through an artist’s feed, you’ll notice something different. Art has been put to work.

Modern art is increasingly defined by its utility. It’s expected to perform a quantifiable function: to optimize a personal brand, to drive algorithmic engagement, to serve as a liquid financial asset, or to deliver a pre-packaged, easily digestible political statement.

And in making this shift from the useless to the hyper-functional, the very nature of art has changed. We have traded the quietness of the object for the loudness of the performance.

To understand what we’ve lost, we have to look at how we used to engage with art. In its non-utilitarian form, a canvas or a sculpture is incomplete on its own. It requires you—the viewer—to meet it halfway.

In the words of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, traditional, useless art acts like a "cool" medium. Because it doesn't spoon-feed you a practical function or an immediate emotional payoff, it demands high participation. You have to stand in front of a Rothko painting or an ancient stone carving, slow your nervous system down, and actively fill in the intellectual and emotional blanks.

The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this contemplative lingering. For Han, the beauty of traditional art lies in its resistance to immediate consumption. It holds a secret, an opacity, that can't be strip-mined for quick value.

Decades earlier, the critic Walter Benjamin called this the "aura" of an artwork, its unique, almost sacred presence in time and space. That aura depended entirely on distance and reverence. Because the artwork wasn't doing anything for you, it forced you to do the work of seeing.

Today, that silence that distance feels almost intolerable to our wired nervous systems.

We live in what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the Culture Industry an environment where every creative impulse is standardized and folded into the logic of the market. In our modern achievement society, every object, action, and hobby has to justify its existence through measurable output. And art hasn't escaped that gravity.

When Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the medium is the message," he meant that the container shapes the content—and more importantly, it reshapes our behavior. So, when the primary medium through which we experience art shifts from a quiet gallery wall to a six-inch backlit screen, the artwork is forced to adapt to the rules of the platform.

And the platform demands utility.

Right now, art is being put to work in three distinct ways.

First, there’s algorithmic utility. Art has to stop the scroll. Color palettes, scales, and subjects are increasingly chosen not for how they resonate in a physical room, but for how quickly they register on a feed within one and a half seconds.

Second, there’s social utility. Art has become a McLuhanian extension of our digital identities. Now, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued a long time ago that art has always been used as "cultural capital" to signal social status. But today, that signaling has been industrialized. Think about those immersive, 360-degree projection exhibits or neon-lit pop-up installations. They are rarely designed for solitary reflection. Their primary utility is to serve as a high-status backdrop for the viewer's own social media presence.

And third, there’s commercial and ideological utility. Whether an artwork is minted as a speculative asset or deployed as corporate virtue-signaling, its value is judged by its immediate return on investment—either in financial capital or in cultural clout. As John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing, consumer culture turns art into a language of glamour and envy. Today, art doesn't just inspire publicity , it is publicity.

And this obsession with utility has birthed a fascinating paradox: the performance of making art has completely eclipsed the art itself.

In 1967, the French theorist Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle that in modern life, "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation."

Watch how visual art is consumed online today, and you are watching Debord’s prophecy come to life. A static photo of a finished painting barely gets any traction anymore. Instead, the artist has to become a performer.

You know the format: the dramatic 15-second timelapse of paint being mixed on a palette. The exaggerated, cinematic brushstroke. The carefully curated studio lighting. The artist stepping back from the canvas in rehearsed awe, timed perfectly to a trending audio track.

In this ecosystem, the final painting is no longer the point. It’s just a prop—a byproduct of a highly utilitarian content machine. The actual product is the spectacle of creation.

And the irony here is pretty sharp when you contrast this with the actual history of Performance Art. In the 1960s and 70s, when artists like Marina Abramović or Chris Burden used their own bodies as the medium, their goal was radically anti-utilitarian. As the performance theorist Peggy Phelan argued, true performance art was defined by its ephemerality. It happened once, it disrupted time, it often made people deeply uncomfortable, and most importantly, it resisted reproduction. It left nothing behind for the market to buy or sell.

Today’s performative art does the exact opposite. It is designed specifically for infinite digital reproduction. It is a "hot" medium in McLuhan’s terms—sensory-rich, fast-paced, and requiring zero effort from the viewer.

In Byung-Chul Han’s words, it is "smooth" art. It offers no friction, no resistance, and no ambiguity—because ambiguity doesn't convert into views, likes, or sales.

So, what happens when we push this utility too far?

Toward the end of his life, McLuhan developed a framework called the Tetrad. He observed that when any medium or cultural phenomenon is pushed to its absolute extreme, it inevitably flips into its opposite.

When art is pushed to the extreme of utility and performance, it reverses into advertising and propaganda.

McLuhan used to say that art was supposed to be a "Distant Early Warning system"—that the artist is like a radar operator standing just outside of society, showing us where our culture is heading before we even realize it ourselves.

But when art has to be useful to an algorithm or a brand, it stops being a radar system. It just becomes a mirror that flatters our existing habits.

Theodor Adorno believed that art’s true social function was precisely its functionlessness. By refusing to be useful to the status quo, art proved that another way of existing was possible. When we force art to be useful, it loses the freedom to be strange, difficult, or prophetic.

Reclaiming art doesn't mean artists have to smash their phones or retreat into caves. It just requires us to recognize the invisible stage that the digital world has built around the canvas.

Because maybe the most radical, rebellious thing an artist—or a viewer—can do today is to step out of the spectacle. To reject the demand for utility. And to create, or simply sit with, something that serves no algorithm, builds no brand, and performs for no camera.

Something unapologetically, gloriously useless.